Guns and terror making US an unsafe security state
As America confronts yet another senseless act of barbaric violence, what kinds of security measures will the country be willing to accept on behalf of safety?
On Sunday, during a Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans, at least
two gunmen opened fire into the crowd, injuring 19 revelers.
What is going on here? How can it be that America seems to be
getting more dangerous despite the raft of over-the-top security
measures that have been put in place since 9/11? Could it be that
the authorities are concentrating their efforts on the wrong
people?
Prior to the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, for example,
which left 3 people dead and 264 wounded, Massachusetts state
officials said they had never received intelligence information
that Moscow had passed to the US about the mastermind of the
attacks, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, a Chechen native who was said to have
been motivated by extremist Islamic beliefs.
The FBI had previously opened a probe into Tsarnaev, but closed
the case without concluding he posed any threat — and without
warning Boston officials that a suspected radical extremist was
loose in their town.
Meanwhile, it has been proven that a Boston police counterterror
intelligence unit spent a significant amount of time and money in
2011 using a US Department of Homeland Security-funded fusion
center to conduct surveillance of specific protest groups,
including Occupy Wall Street offshoots and anti-war
demonstrators.
Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis admitted to a congressional
panel following the attacks that federal agents failed to warn his
department of Tsarnaev. Davis told lawmakers “we would have
liked to know” about the Russian tip-off.
In October, the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts
published documents confirming that the Boston Police
Department spied on protesters and even relied on their local
federally funded fusion centers to further their probe.
The American people were given their first taste of the security
state following the terror attacks of 9/11. Before the fires had
been extinguished from the site of the World Trade Center, former
President George W. Bush signed – opportunistically, many critics
say – the Patriot Act.
This massive document, which few members of Congress had
the time or desire to read, allows for roving wiretaps,
court-ordered searches of business records and library book
withdrawals, and surveillance of private citizens.
Washington continues to demonstrate with breathless audacity –
in the heat of an emergency when the country is still dusting
itself off – that the liberties and freedoms of the American people
are chimerical creations, leaves of paper that may blow away on the
wind with a mere nod of Caesar’s head.
Once a government
This article originally appeared on : RT
Source: http://rinf.com/alt-news/breaking-news/guns-and-terror-making-us-an-unsafe-security-state/33217/
